Dispatch from Juárez

In the Miami Herald, photographer Richard Ellis offers a vivid picture of life in Juárez, including an eyewitness account of a killing on a busy street in broad daylight. The article is quite gripping, but it leaves me with a couple of questions. First, the author's conclusions on the military arrival are perhaps a bit premature:

Another 5,000 soldiers were deployed last month to take charge of the police department.

At first, the soldiers were welcomed and the heavily armed patrols seemed to calm the city, but they didn't necessarily stop the violence. History has shown that soldiers make poor police officers -- military training is based on achieving an objective, while the police are taught to enforce and respect the law.

Recent events in Juárez seem to show that the military, or at least some of the military, is impatient with the lawmaking and judicial systems, which seem to have failed the citizens of Juárez. The evidence appears to show that military-style death squads are picking up where the justice system has failed.

I wish he would have expanded on the death-squad line of thought a bit. That's a pretty devastating charge, and I don't doubt that there's some truth to it, but I'd love to see it fleshed out beyond the anecdotal. Of course, that's an easy complaint for me to make from the relative safety of the Laguna; I sure wouldn't want to be chasing down death-squad leads in Juárez right now.

Shifting directions: I believe that the announcement about the army deployment was made on February 28th (I first saw it in the papers on March 1st), and the troops were still arriving last week. Saying "last month" makes it seem like enough time has passed to make a judgment on the army's efficacy in Juárez, and the author appears to be predisposed to judge that deployment harshly. However, the complete contingent hasn't been operating for even a week, so it's a bit hasty to say definitively that the soldiers "didn't necessarily stop the violence."

Furthermore, he says that history has shown that the army filling in for the police is a bad idea. Generally speaking, I agree, but it also warrants mentioning that lots of Mexican cities and regions (Sinaloa this year, Michoacán since 2007) have seen a drop in violence thanks at least in part to a robust army deployment. It may just be temporary, but if you're living in one of those cities (say, Torreón, Coahuila), you don't really care, you're just happy to see someone more powerful than the local gangs. 

One other issue is this passage:

The attack was precise, quickly executed and efficient. Not a single bullet missed the mark, a wall less than five feet from the shooting showed no scars, and only 12 shell casings were found left behind. That's quite a contrast to the executions of a year ago, in which drug gangs would routinely expend 200 or more rounds to hit their targets. The assassinations are either getting more efficient, or a better brand of assassin is in town.

This idea --that where they used to be bumblers, now the Juárez killers are pros-- was also put forth in a December piece in the Washington Post. I found it very strange then, and I find it strange now. It's fair to say that in a city with five killings a day, you'll find killers of varying degrees of ability, from olympic-level snipers to unskilled thugs. (This Proceso cover story dealt with the pay scale for the variously skilled assassins operating in Juárez.) To extrapolate from one killing a wholesale change in a city where several thousand have been murdered in recent years seems a bit of a stretch. But then again, perhaps the two reporters are basing this on chatter they picked up in Juárez.